Tag: photog’s Corner

Christmas cookies account for a full 30% of my annual weight gain. Oatmeal, chocolate chip and Grandma cookies (or white cookies as one of my brothers calls them) are sinfully good with a mug of coffee.

Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

The only ones that don’t tempt me are the sugar cookies. With their sweetness and the colored sugar crystals adorning them I think of them as a snack for young children who haven’t yet developed a more discerning palate (to each his own).

Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

Camera Girl is revered by all who can get their greedy hands on any of these treasures and the short time that they last is one of the high points of the culinary calendar.

Since absconding with my game camera the Rodent of Unusual Size has been unobserved. He probably sold it on ebay and used the proceeds to fund a vacation in Cancun. Well, partially funded anyway. But the puddle has remained at its elevated level so I decided to venture into the swamp and see what I could see.

There was no sign of the waterlogged rat anywhere but his handiwork was all around.

Here are some photos of his tree chopping abilities.

Beaver chewed branches, Sony A7 III, Minolta 200mm f\4 macro lens

Beaver chopped sapling, Sony A7 III, Minolta 200mm f\4 macro lens

And here is a mess he left while chewing the bark of sticks. I should turn him into the Staties for littering.

And here is the much vaunted dam. Well, as a fellow engineer I can only say he’ll have to do a lot better than this if he expects to get his P.E stamp.

Downstream view of beaver dam, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

Downstream view of beaver dam, Sony 35mm f\1.4 macro lens

Downstream view of beaver dam, Sony 35mm f\1.4 macro lens

And here’s a close-up of his handiwork.

Downstream view of beaver dam, Sony 35mm f\1.4 macro lens

Disappearing like this leads me to believe either he has been eaten by one of his woodland brothers (coyote would be my guess). Or he’s gone completely nocturnal. I could test this theory out if I still had a game camera. Oh well, maybe Santa will come through.

Camera Girl is a great naturalist. She likes being called Hawkeye because of her sharp and discerning vision. She uses this keen sense mostly to see what it says on the speedometer in order to tell me I’m driving too fast. But she also is adept at spotting interesting flora and fauna in the great wide world of our back yard. She spots monarch butterfly caterpillars and hungry foxes and great blue herons and all kinds of birds around her feeders. She discovers muskrats and minks and turkeys and turkey vultures, hawks and deer and coyotes and all kinds of flowers wild and garden. Last year at about this time she spotted some unusual white plants sprouting underneath a conifer on the edge of a heavily wooded area of the property. I thanked her for her find and proceeded to acquire a nice collection of mosquito bites crawling around on my belly trying to get a shot. Here is the plant.

I thought it a very interesting plant and assumed it was white only because it was in a darkly shaded area. I thought no more about it until this year. In the last few weeks we have had some extremely hot and also some extremely rainy weather. So even though it is August my “lawn” is a verdant carpet of crab grass. And at the same time a great variety of different species of mushrooms have appeared in the yard, especially close to some wooded areas of the property. Camera Girl knows I like to use mushrooms as subjects for close-up and macro photography and so she provides me with info on the best new mushroom sightings. This year was no exception so I have managed to photograph a goodly number of interesting fungi. But what was different was her discovery of additional specimens of the sprouting white plants. I was able to use the superb magnified focus of my new Sony A7 III to very good advantage on these plants.

And because the places I found the plants was not as dark as last year’s location I decided that their coloration was not a fluke of location. They really were white. Using all the resources of the interwebs I was able to identify these unusual plants. It is known systematically as Monotropa uniflora but commonly it is called Indian pipe, ghost plant and corpse plant. It has no chlorophyll to allow it to produce sugar from carbon dioxide and water. Instead it steals its food from underground fungi of the family Russulaceae.

This condition of lacking chlorophyll and living parasitically off fungi makes the Indian pipe what is known in botany as an obligate myco-heterotroph. And it gets even more complicated than that. The fungus that Indian pipe is mooching off is simultaneously in a symbiotic existence with underground tree roots of beech and other woodland trees. The tree roots allow the fungus access to sugar and the fungus breaks down decaying material in the soil so that the trees can absorb the nutrients it could not obtain on its own. In fact, the tree roots and the fungi form an interface called a mycorrhizal network in which the cells of the roots and the fungus interpenetrate each other to allow nutrient materials to flow in both directions to the mutual benefit of both. So it was no coincidence that Camera Girl discovered the Indian pipe while scouting out new mushrooms. The torrential rain and torrid heat of the last few weeks is what triggered the sprouting mushrooms and the Indian pipe bloom. And now I see the even closer relation between these two life forms. The mushroom is the victim of the Indian pipe thief.

So, this is the kind of weird stuff that I am interested in. This doesn’t really belong solely in photography or current events and definitely not in science fiction or reviews. That is why photog’s Corner was made, for this kind of weird stuff. Caveat lector, let the reader beware.

Old people and literary types will have heard of Thomas Mann. He was a German author born in 1875. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in the 1920s and he belonged to the Modernist school. Back in the 1970s if you had a high school English teacher who was especially perverse he would assign a book of Mann’s called “Death in Venice and Other Stories.” Now the title story “Death in Venice,” is vile. It’s the story of an old German writer who has a premonition of death and goes to Venice to feel young again. He has an infatuation verging on pedophilia for an adolescent boy that mercifully goes unfulfilled and then to the reader’s great relief the protagonist dies. The only legitimate reason to read this story is for law enforcement profilers to gain a better understanding of pedophile motivation.

One of the other stories in the book is called “A Man and His Dog.” It is autobiographical and describes Mann’s life in a suburban/rural area of Germany. He chronicles the walks he takes with his approximately German Shorthaired Pointer dog Bashan. We hear about the landscape, the flora and fauna and the farmland occupants of his little world. It is without a doubt, the best thing in the story collection and I’ve always envied his opportunity to share a slice of his world and life in such a congenial narrative. It really is a pleasure to read.

So, even though I keep German Short Haired Pointers, I can’t do what Mann did. I don’t have his facility for felicitous phrasing. But I’m a lot funnier than he was. So, from time to time, I’ll address things in a post that have very little to do with politics, photography or science fiction. When that happens, I’ll assign them to the category “photog’s Corner” and that will be a warning sign of irrelevance to the primary foci of this blog. Caveat emptor.